Liar, liar, pants on fire

Duncan Fallowell reviews The Real Life of Anthony Burgess by Andrew Biswell

The Burgess problem continues. "What was he?" was the question Roger Lewis sought to answer in his visceral biography of 2002. "Who was he?" is the question Andrew Biswell is answering in this epidermal one, a careful and necessary ordering of the mess. Both biographers have had to deal with the same difficulties, the first of which is adumbrated on Biswell's opening page, where one reads that Burgess "engaged in a good deal of public and private fantasising… laying down an alarming number of false trails…" In other words, the man was a liar.

This lying doubtless originated with the loss of his mother before he was two, the beginning of exile; it freed him at the outset from veracity since there is an equation between "home" and "truth". To be true means to be grounded at your core, and Burgess never was. Everything about him was provisional and opportunistic. He didn't even know where his mother was buried, but understood she was a Catholic, which was untrue (Biswell has found her grave in a Protestant cemetery in Manchester). Biswell refers to "Burgess's harmless tendency to misremember the events of his own past for comic or dramatic effect". But it isn't harmless. The habitual bending of the truth for ulterior motives had important consequences for Burgess's art. Cavalier liars think that anything will do. The idea of revising something to make it more true never occurs to him. Yet this inner truth is the essence of great art.

The second difficulty is his erotic life and sense of himself as a man. All men have a potency complex in varying degrees. Burgess's was highly developed. At heart he was curiously unassertive. Even the pen-name "Anthony Burgess" was chosen for him by his editor at Heinemann. Roger Lewis judged him largely impotent, but Biswell unravels an ongoing if ramshackle sex life, with the help of old neighbours such as the useful Mrs Fishenden, who says they "were always having sexual traumas in their house, audible to all around".

Burgess's first wife Lynne was a nymphomaniac alcoholic who drank herself to death after a series of failed suicide attempts. To call this marriage "open" would be misleading. It was wide open for Lynne - she'd climb sozzled into bed with any man - which gave Burgess endless opportunities with other women. But he never took them. He presented himself in his autobiographies and in interviews as a sexual sophisticate and philanderer, which was untrue. Lewis made the case that Burgess's son by his second wife, Liana, wasn't his.

Biswell's response - "it is more than likely that this child was his" - hardly deals with it. Perhaps nobody knows the truth, and yet the son was important to Burgess as proof of his potency to the world at large. Again the sexual question is not merely a personal matter but governs one's approach to the work. Burgess told me that fecundity as a writer was a parallel of erotic freeing-up and that careful writers were not sexual people. He was clearly boasting that what made him a prolific author also made him a great lay. Not so.

The third difficulty derives from the previous two - his absurdity. Lewis was highly sensitive to the Manchester music-hall aspect of the Burgess persona, but I don't think Burgess was, nor is Biswell. Burgess thought he was Cervantes, but in fact he is Don Quixote. There is no Burgess book that gives the impression you are reading something entirely grown-up. That a book might be brooded over or lived was alien to him. Instead he gluttonised on nicotine, booze and stimulants.

Enough of our meanness. What is on the plus side? The liar was not constant. Having now read both biographies, I've looked back over my own two

long interviews and discovered that nearly everything he told me was true. He was not at all vindictive - how rare in the literary world! His kindness and warmth, which showed in his face as well as his conduct, were doubtless among the reasons Graham Greene disliked him (Greene was unnerved by spontaneous personalities; only he was allowed to be spontaneous). And as Biswell clearly shows, what Burgess put up with from his first wife makes him a saint.

His authorial fecundity was an aspect not of his sexiness but of his openness. Biswell relates how enthusiastic Burgess was with the inner-city kids he taught in New York, endlessly patient with their rudeness and fatuity. Burgess was a cranky charmer who could sound off on anything to fabulous effect - and he wasn't a bully in conversation. Though not social, he and Liana were a marvellous double act down on the Côte d'Azur. Burgess was never as spicy, lighthearted and grown-up in any of his works as he was in this relationship - which remains an untold story.

A Clockwork Orange is an important book, very prescient - it was published in 1962, nine years before William Burroughs's The Wild Boys. Biswell debates the problem of the final chapter: should it or should it not be there? I didn't know there was a problem and have Burgess on record saying "Did your copy have the final chapter? There should be 21 but there's a lot going round with only 20. Some idiot left it off by mistake."

He was a terrific journalist. Couldn't write a dreary column to save his life. Biswell makes full use of radio and television material, which biographers rarely do, but doesn't touch the journalism, which is a shame. His map of the life is much clearer than Lewis's but it is from the Lewis book that Burgess emerges the greater figure. If Michael Holroyd is reading, would he like to try a third biography?